BUDAPEST, February 27. /TASS/. Hungary considers the act of sabotage at the Nord Stream gas pipeline a terror attack and will pool its efforts with Serbia to prevent such incidents at pipelines running across southern Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Monday.
In his speech at the opening of the parliament’s spring session, he touched upon problems of energy security and stressed that the Nord Stream blast was an act of terrorism. He pledged that the Hungarian authorities, together with Serbian partners, will take measures to prevent such acts of sabotage at the "southern pipeline," obviously referring to Turk Stream’s branch running via Bulgaria and Serbia and feeding Hungary with Russian gas.
The Hungarian government said earlier that the country had received 4.8 billion cubic meters of gas via this route last year. Now that Nord Stream is disabled, this route is the main one for Hungary.
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented damage that had occurred the day before on three strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 offshore gas pipelines. On September 26, Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on the pipeline routes. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office launched a criminal case on charges of international terrorism.
According to US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s article published on February 8, explosives were planted under the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines by US Navy divers with assistance from Norwegian specialists under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 exercise last June. The story cited an unidentified source as saying that US President Joe Biden personally authorized the operation after nine months of discussions with administration officials in charge of security matters. Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House told TASS, replying to the news agency’s question, that the Hersh story was totally false and complete fiction.